Little chicks are starting to venture out from under mum. 🐥 Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . Little chicks are starting to venture out from under mum. 🐥 Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS...

“Cheers.” I like to say a toast to the day: to myself and others: peace, hope, happiness, health. After I raised my glass of orange juice, I looked up and saw a rainbow. I don’t think I have ever seen a rainbow from this view before: a rainbow that stands out among the grey clouds, originating from a valley in which many stories have been told. As I watch the rainbow and notice the clouds movie, a tiny grey cloud floats past, insignificant relative to the rainbow: rain created the conditio...

A dark academia desk setup blends vintage scholarship with moody lighting and rich textures. Think candlelit libraries, leather-bound books, brass accents, and aged wood. The look works in a full study room or a small bedroom corner. The ideas below cover furniture, decor, color, lighting, and how to hide modern tech in your dark academia home office without breaking the aesthetic. What Defines a Dark Academia Desk Setup A dark academia desk setup pulls from old university...

I maintain SumatraPDF on GitHub. People fork it and make their own changes. I want to know which forks are active and what they’re working on. GitHub has a Network tab for this. I find it lousy. It’s hard to see active forks at a glance. Panning and zooming the UI is slow and fiddly. I just want a sorted list of forks with actual changes. So I wrote a small script: github-active-forks.ts . What it does It uses the GitHub API to find forks that have ahead c...

WASHINGTON (June 17, 2026) — Shield AI, the defense technology company building the world’s best autonomous solutions and next-generation aircraft, has been awarded a production contract by the U.S. Air Force to implement Hivemind mission autonomy software for the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program.   The production award reflects the Air Force’s software-first approach to autonomy and its decision to evaluate mission autonomy as a standalone capability within the CCA program....

Anubis is about to get WebAssembly-based proof of work checks so that administrators can use a non-SHA256 proof of work method to protect their websites. Part of the implementation goals of this work is that the check logic is defined in one place on both client and server. The client and server will then hook into the WebAssembly in order to make sure they're running in lockstep. However, one small problem comes up. What do you do when the client has WebAssembly disabled? I really...

I might have mentioned before that I've been slowly working through the Simple tutorial for building a Sea of Nodes compiler. A lot of it is still sort of going over my head but I've learned a couple of interesting things in the process of working through it that I think I can bring back to a query planning context. One thing I learned from it is that my understanding of Hash Consing was a bit myopic. Or incomplete. I have always thought of hash consing as a way to turn value equality in...

People who think current AI use is unsustainable often rely on the claim that inference GPUs only last “three years at the most” under load 1 . The idea here is that once the AI bubble money drains away, current infrastructure will rapidly become obsolete, and there won’t be enough money floating around to buy a whole slate of brand-new GPUs. Inference costs would thus rapidly become way too expensive for current AI products to make any financial sense. Where does this “three years ...

For much of the day Sydney time, the VM hosting this site and a few for my family have been smashed with traffic with spoofed headers, but from IP ranges associated with the Alibaba Cloud, specifically these: 47.79.200.0/24 47.79.206.0/24 47.79.207.0/24 They issued a sufficient number of requests to overwhelm my php_fpm pool, resulting in sites sometimes returning a 502 Bad Gateway. Bad gateway, bad. I’ve blocked the entire damned ranges for now and bumped up my server specs, whi...

Hello, Good news today Circuit network Klonan We have several more circuit network improvements to share with you today. Boiler/Heat exchanger circuit connection The Boiler type entities can now be connected to the circuit network, which makes it super easy to set up backup or emergency power conditions. You will also notice the beautiful new Heat exchanger graphics and working animation by Zsolti. Land mine Land mine was less o...

Since its molecular structure was deduced in the 1950s, DNA has been hailed by many biologists as the secret of life. They’ve read and studied the information stored in the DNA found in the cells of living organisms, known as their genomes, and claimed that this genetic database must be some kind of blueprint, code script, or computer. But if DNA really does harbor some greater secret about how… Source Since its molecular structure was deduced in the 1950s, DNA has been hailed by many bio...

In April my car was in the shop three times. It was supposed to be one trip (O2 sensor, evap leak, & tires), but it wound up being divided into three because of some unavailability on my part and the mechanic’s, combined with a delayed shipment. Anyway, I got it back and figured I’d be done with that stuff for a bit. Within 24 hours I was jacking it up to see if a wheel bearing was bad, and within 48 I was riding back in a tow truck. In April my car was in the shop three times. It was suppo...

On January 16, 2026, an impossible bug was solved. A bug in a library downloaded over a billion times every year, with a wall of comments asking for help, several hacked-together workarounds, and an open call to the entire internet to please try to solve it. A bug that had been open for 15 years, languishing as the oldest open issue on the project’s GitHub, predating its migration to GitHub even, because it had stymied every person who had tried to tackle it. I myself had already spent a full ...

Last week I saw a talk by Northwestern professor Nina Wieda on the history of the Silk Road , a network of trading routes across Asia active from the second century BCE until the mid-15th century. I knew of the Silk Road but was surprised by how much it used and fostered various technologies.  It started with a technology that allowed for traveling long distances with limited access to water, better known as a camel. Travel was slow, it could take nearly two years to get from one end (modern d...

I’ve been working with local models since they came out, and finally, they’re surprisingly good now. I have a 2022 M2 Mac with 64 GB RAM and 1TB storage and I’ve used Mistral 7B Gemma 3 OpenAI OSS-20B Qwen 3 MOE , as well as a number of other Qwen variants like Qwen 2.5 Coder across a lot of different system setups like raw llama.cpp with Open WebUI llama-cpp-python Ollama llamafiles and LM Studio Where are local models now? Early on, models were slo...

Suppose that you have a configuration file in JSON. Something like this: { "width" : 1920 , "height" : 1080 , "fullscreen" : true , "title" : "My Game" , "volume" : 0.8 } Normally you ship this file alongside your program, open it at startup, read it, and parse it. That is a lot of work for data that never changes. What if the file is fixed at build time? Could the compiler read it, parse it, and bake the result directly into the executable as a constant? Wit...

Gentle A gentler world begins in the way you touch your heart. Be soft with the light inside you. Caress your body with this breath. God is nothing else but the place where the sun comes up in your chest. You are the glimmering destination. You are the golden honey daubed on the bread of the ordinary. Whatever is perfect, whatever is heavenly, begins here. — Fred LaMotte Do not bargain to be loved.  Do not negotiate.  When love is withheld as a punishment, as a manip...

Today we launched a new plugin for Datasette, datasette-apps , with this launch announcement post on the Datasette project blog. That post has the what , but I'm going to expand on that a little bit here to provide the why . The TL;DR Datasette Apps are self-contained HTML+JavaScript applications that run in a tightly constrained sandbox hosted on your Datasette application. They can use JavaScript to run read-only SQL queries against data in Datasette, and can run write queries too ...

If you are subscribed to People and Blogs, you might have noticed that today’s newsletter arrived from a different address. That’s because the always lovely Zach has officially become the new custodian of this series. The peopleandblogs.com domain name has been transferred, the mailing list has been migrated (from Buttondown to Buttondown), and the RSS feed has been redirected. As I wrote in a previous post , I’m gonna publish three more interviews here on the site before official...

Go 1.27 is getting a goroutine leak detector in runtime/pprof . The proposal was accepted in April. A few common goroutine leaks # A goroutine leaks when it blocks on a channel or lock that nothing will ever release, so it lingers for the life of the process. I’ve been using uber-go/goleak to catch them in tests. One is an early return that strands a sender, which I covered in Early return and goroutine leak . It looks like this: func run ( tasks [] func () error ) ...

These posts are Version 2 of this material. Please email me with feedback. Sex and Drugs and Guns and Code Restart A Little Psychology How We Got Here More Psychology When the Model is the Harm Privacy, Power, and the Self Who Gets What and Why More Analogies What We Owe the Future Regulation Works How Change Happens AI Happens Bibliography · Glossary · A Note on LLMS A lot of people are afraid that AI is going to take their jobs. That fear is legitimate...

One of the most interesting projects my colleagues have done with LLMs has been building a system with Bayer to allow pharmaceutical researchers to query decades of information about studies buried in PDF reports. Sarang Sanjay Kulkarni describes its evolution from keyword-based search to an intelligent research assistant capable of answering complex questions and drafting regulatory documents. more… One of the most interesting projects my colleagues have...

At this year’s ECOOP, the Institute for System Software will be attending with the almost complete team and we’re going to present on a variety of topics. Come and talk to us at ICOOOLPS, MPLR, the Demo Track, DEBT, ECOOP Academy, and at the poster session! Below, a brief overview and when the talks are scheduled. Monday, June 29, 2pm: AOT Meta-Compilation of Dynamic Languages Towards Ahead-of-Time Meta-Compilation of Dynamic Languages With an Extensible Type Analysis Christop...